More About Me:

Automotive Journalism

For the 2014 edition of duPont Registry's Exotic Car Buyers Guide (Read, Buy), I contributed the lion's share of the car reviews, more than 16,000 words' worth of articles detailing the latest and greatest automobiles available for 2014.

Automotive Background

With a passion for reading car magazines as I grew up, I originally got my Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg to become an automotive writer. Since then, I've continually pursued outlets that would draw me more into the automotive fold: I worked with Lazydays on R.V.–related copy for S.E.O. landing pages, prepared scripts for an automotive video project for U.S. News and World Report, speculated on what changes will be made to future automobiles for CarPreview, and reviewed the automotive world's crème de la crème for Beautiful World International magazine.

While my publication in these outlets were all significant, I am proudest of my function as the S.E.O. and online editor at duPont Publishing. There, I wrote thousands of articles and weblogs as well as tutorials, press releases, and basic web-site content. But, looking back, I regard my work on its annual Exotic Car Buyers Guide magazine as the most fulfilling. I think my pride in that magazines has as much to do with the amount of time I spent working on it each year—normally about three months—as the undeniable yet strangely vague appeal of seeing your work in print form. Unfortunately, since I do not have access to the Exotic Car Buyers Guide online editions, this site will have to showcase my other online articles.

Benefits of Original Content

Of my online pieces, I am most satisfied with my car reviews and my original, investigative reporting. Both required a little bit more work on my part—I also took pictures, and we made some videos—but original content and investigative reporting are a benefit to the audience, the community, and search engines: The audience may gain some otherwise unknown insight, the community will trust you more, and Google and other search engines love novelty and standalone merit.

Unfortunately, time for car reviews and investigating pieces can be limited. Businesses often grade performance on output, and a 500-word article using a press release takes less time than a 500-word article where I drive a car or interview people regarding a certain subject. To me, it is about balancing the two: tracking trending topics and highlighting new discoveries even if it comes from others and intermittently setting your sights on a story requiring completely original ideas or reporting.

In the end, I think both provided something. Articles where I just re-iterated something (with some basic research thrown in for validity) did well. In fact, some of the more-sensational articles have driven in a lot of traffic, causing spikes in daily-visitors graph; on the other hand, many of the articles requiring original content have garnished the attention and links of other publications. These links have helped standings in both the search engines and the community.